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SubscribeBrunel Pension Partnership has confirmed it is withdrawing from a resolution it co-filed for this year’s Barclays AGM as the lender committed to scale back on fossil fuel financing.
The £35bn LGPS pool, which invests on behalf of ten client funds in the south east of the UK, has been engaging with Barclays, one of the five largest banks in Europe, for more than three years.
The pool’s shareholder engagement appears to have culminated in success, as Barclays today (9 February) announced an updated energy policy which includes a clear commitment to cease lending to new oil and gas projects.
Barclays has been under fire from investors for being one of the largest lenders to the European fossil fuel industry between 2016 and 2022.
Brunel had been co-filing resolutions since 2020 urging the bank to scale back on fossil fuel lending. In 2020, the resolution received 23% of shareholder backing.
But Brunel and its co-filer, the campaign group Share Action, had been speaking to the bank behind the scenes, as Vaishnavi Ravishankar, head of stewardship at Brunel explained.
“The decision follows constructive and fruitful discussions with Barclays over the last few months, and progress by the bank on the majority of investor asks, in the form of an updated energy policy,” she said.
While Share Action welcomed the updated policy, Kelly Shields, campaign manager at the group, said the strategy could have gone much further. “Barclays’ intention to request decarbonisation plans from its oil and gas clients is the right one. But for it to have teeth, the bank must demand clients stop engaging in activities that increase the climate crisis such as oil and gas exploration.
“Barclays is wrong not to have ruled out financing companies that focus exclusively on fossil fuel extraction. This should include fracking, which is causing so much environmental and social harm and is an activity the bank is heavily exposed to,” she added.
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